Customers Impatient with Poor Web Performance

Customers have little patience with a pokey web site and will quickly jump to a competitor’s site, even during peak usage periods.

“Web performance impacts business results, whether measured by revenue, conversions or brand strength,” says Jeff Loeb, a vice president at Gomez, a division of Compuware, which recently polled 1,500 people who had performed e-transactions during recent busy periods.

If a site falters, many consumers simply go to a competing site, including in the case of banks and brokerages, where such a move requires the inconvenience of opening new accounts, Loeb said.

The survey, conducted in December, found that 78 percent of consumers jumped to a competitor’s site after encountering slow-loading pages, errors or transaction problems. Moreover, 88 percent said they are less likely to return to a site whose performance disappointed them.

“People are pretty impatient nowadays and they don’t want to wait,” Loeb said. “They have other choices.”

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